Alison Bechdel
“The writer’s business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.”
Alison Bechdel is a MacArthur “Genius Grant” awardee, Guggenheim fellow, and the author of multiple best-selling graphic memoirs and novels. After developing a cult following with her beloved comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which she self-syndicated for 25 years, Alison rose to mainstream acclaim with the publication of her graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), an instant literary classic that was adapted into a Broadway musical by the playwright Lisa Kron and the composer Jeanine Tesori. Fun Home opened on Broadway in 2015 and won five Tony Awards, including “Best Musical.”
In her work, Bechdel is preoccupied with the overlap of the political and the personal spheres, the relationship of the self to the world outside. Her 2012 memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama examines her relationship with her mother alongside the theories of the 20th century British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Her 2021 memoir The Secret to Superhuman Strength explores the pursuit of fitness and self-transcendence, while her autofictional graphic novel Spent (2025) dives into late capitalism, climate change, privilege, and lefty activism, in a mordant satire The New York Times hails as “brilliant…and a rollicking good time.”
Alison’s comics have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta. She lives up a hill in Vermont with her wife Holly.
